Why Holocaust Analogies Are Dangerous

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SPRING 2019

Why Holocaust Analogies Are Dangerous

HATE IS THE ENEMY.

BUT SO IS TIME.

The Holocaust has become verbal shorthand for good vs. evil.

IN FIVE YEARS, less than 0.0 1% of World War II veterans will be alive and the

youngest Holocaust survivor will be 79. Who do we want to tell their stories

to the 1.9 billion young people across the globe who need to hear them?

But calling our opponents Nazis degrades us all.

STRATEGIC ADVANCEMENT COMMITTEE

Allan M. Holt, Committee Chairman and Museum Vice Chairman, Washington, DC

Howard M. Lorber, Museum Chairman, New York, NY

Jonathan S. Lavine, Boston, MA

Alan B. Lazowski, Hartford, CT

William S. Levine, Phoenix, AZ

Susan E. Lowenberg, San Francisco, CA

David M. Marchick, Washington, DC

Daniel Mendelson, Washington, DC

Richard S. Price, Chicago, IL

Elliot J. Schrage, San Francisco, CA

Betty Schwartz, Livingston, NJ

David Schwartz, Chicago, IL

Irvin N. Shapell, Wheeling, WV

Oliver K. Stanton, New York, NY

Jay Stein, Jacksonville, FL

Howard Unger, New York, NY

Bradley D. Wine, Washington, DC

MKT.01915B.MAG

CAMPAIGN

Laurence M. Baer, San Francisco, CA

Tom A. Bernstein, New York, NY

Elisa Spungen Bildner, Montclair, NJ

Amy Cohn, Phoenix, AZ

Lester Crown, Chicago, IL

Joseph D. Gutman, Chicago, IL

J. David Heller, Cleveland, OH

Howard Konar, Rochester, NY

| INSIDE | Dangerous Holocaust Analogies | Evidence of Genocide in Burma | Polls from the ¡¯30s and ¡¯40s |

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MEMORY&ACTION

Vol. 7, No. 1

THIS

ISSUE Spring 2019

32

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2 FIRST WORD

Why Holocaust analogies are dangerous.

6 THE GENOCIDE WE SAW COMING

It is important to stand with Burma¡¯s Rohingya, who have been

persecuted for decades and denied the very right to exist as a people.

10 A NEW LAW ON GENOCIDE PREVENTION

Bipartisan support passes the Elie Wiesel Act.

12 A WHOLE-SCHOOL APPROACH

Why did a team of educators at the Museum¡¯s Belfer conference include

math, science, and special education teachers?

14 WHAT DID AMERICANS THINK?

Public opinion polls from the 1930s and 1940s help us understand the

response to the Nazi threat.

36

28

22 QUICK TAKE

A son sees his mother¡¯s ?nal letter on display.

24 ARTIFACTS WITH STORIES TO TELL

Scholars learn from ¡°material culture¡± at the new David and Fela Shapell

Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center.

28 VOICES FROM SYRIAN CIVIL SOCIETY

As violence continues, Syrians fear the future.

32 THE MUSEUM¡¯S CAMPAIGN

Holocaust survivor Bernard Aptaker¡¯s experience of persecution, loss,

and survival left him determined to shape a better future.

36 FINAL WORD

Dr. Deborah Lipstadt says individuals can¡ªand must¡ªcounter soft-core

Holocaust denial.

All photographs

US Holocaust Memorial Museum

unless otherwise noted.

Look for this symbol to explore even more about these stories online.

24

UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM MAGAZINE I Chairman Howard M. Lorber I Vice Chairman Allan M. Holt I Director Sara J. Bloomfield I Chief Marketing and Communications

Officer Michelle Tycher Stein I Associate Creative Director Amy Donovan I Editor Barbara E. Martinez I Staff Writers Kitson Jazynka and Marisa Beahm Klein I Art Director Leigh LaHood

Senior Designers Mary Gasperetti and Joanne Zamore I Photo Editor Miriam Lomaskin I Photographer Joel Mason-Gaines I Production Manager David Fitzgerald I Project Manager Maria Clark

All content ? 2019 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum I 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW Washington, DC 20024-2126 I Send inquiries to magazine@.

FIRST

WORD

By Edna Friedberg

Why Holocaust Analogies

Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize, demean, and

intimidate their targets. But there is a cost for all of us.

Are Dangerous

NAZIS SEEM TO BE EVERYWHERE THESE DAYS . I don¡¯t mean

self-proclaimed neo-Nazis. I¡¯m talking about folks being labeled

as Nazis, Hitler, Gestapo, Goering¡ªtake your pick¡ªby their

political opponents. American politicians from across the ideological

spectrum, influential media figures, and ordinary people on social

media casually use Holocaust terminology to bash anyone or any

policy with which they disagree. The takedown is so common

that it¡¯s even earned its own term, reductio ad Hitlerum.

2 2UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM MAGAZINE



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Auschwitz

Fascist

Evil

This trend is far from new, but it is escalating

at a disturbing rate in increasingly polarized

times. The Holocaust has become shorthand

for good vs. evil; it is the epithet to end

all epithets. And the current environment

of rapid-fire online communication and

viral memes lends itself particularly well to

this sort of sloppy analogizing. Worse, the

environment allows the analogies to spread

more widely and quickly.

This oversimplified approach to complex history is dangerous.

When conducted with integrity and rigor,

the study of history raises more questions

than answers. And as the most extensively

documented crime the world has ever seen,

the Holocaust offers an unmatched case study

in how societies fall apart, in the immutability

of human nature, in the dangers of unchecked

state power. It is more than European or Jewish

history. It is human history. Almost 40 years

ago, the United States Congress chartered a

Holocaust memorial on the National Mall

for precisely this reason: The questions

raised by the Holocaust transcend all divides.

Neither the political right nor left has a

monopoly on exploiting the six million Jews,

who were murdered in a state-sponsored,

systematic campaign of genocide, to demonize

or intimidate their political opponents.

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UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM MAGAZINE

Hitler

Recently, some conservative media figures

explicitly likened Parkland, Florida, students

advocating for tightened gun control to Hitler

Youth, operating in the service of a shadowy

authoritarian conspiracy. This allegation

included splicing images of these students onto

historical film footage of Nazi rallies, reflecting

the ease with which many Americans associate

the sound of German shouting with a threat

to personal liberties. A state representative in

Minnesota joined the online bandwagon in

these accusations.

Perhaps most popular this year have been

accusations of ¡°Nazism¡± and ¡°fascism¡± against

federal authorities for their treatment of

children separated from their parents at the

US border with Mexico. ¡°Remember, other

governments put kids in camps,¡± is a typical

rallying cry from some immigration advocates.

Even a person as well versed in the tenuous

balance between national security and

compassion as the former head of the CIA

took to Twitter to criticize federal policies

toward illegal migrants using a black and

white photo of the iconic train tracks leading

to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Nazi

comparisons have also been leveled against

the federal government in connection with a

travel ban on individuals from predominantly

Muslim countries. Animal rights proponents

have consistently decried what they call

¡°the Holocaust on your plate¡± in critiquing

today¡¯s meat industry. The list goes on.

It is all too easy to forget that there are many

people still alive for whom the Holocaust is not

¡°history,¡± but their life story and that of their

families. These are not abstract tragedies on call

to win an argument or an election. They carry

the painful memories of the brutal murder of a

cherished baby boy, the rape of a beloved sister,

the parents arrested and never seen again.

As the Holocaust recedes in time,some

Americans (and Europeans) are becoming

increasingly casual and disrespectful to the

mass murder of millions. More dangerous,

today the Internet disseminates insensitive or

hateful remarks with unprecedented ease and

influence. Online discussions tend to encourage

extreme opinions; they allow people to live

in echo chambers of their own ideologies and

peers. Weimar Germany¡ªthe period between

the First World War and the Nazi rise to

power¡ªis an exemplar of the threats that

emerge when the political center fails to hold,

when social trust is allowed to erode and the

fissures exploited.

Quality Holocaust education may have the

potential to bridge some of the divides our

nation is experiencing. It enables people to

pause. To step away from the problems and

debates of the present. To be challenged by

this catastrophic event of the past. That is

what good history education does. It doesn¡¯t

preach. It teaches. It engages at a personal

level. It promotes self-reflection and critical

thinking about the world and one¡¯s own roles

and responsibilities. That engagement is lost

when we resort to grossly simplified Holocaust

analogies. And it demeans the memory of

the dead.

In 1953, the British novelist L. P. Hartley

wrote, ¡°The past is a foreign country; they

do things differently there.¡± Comparing and

categorizing are natural human impulses.

We all use categories and analogies to navigate

through life. But the nature of Nazi crimes

demands that we study the evidence, alert

ourselves to warning signs, wrestle with

the world¡¯s moral failure. When we reduce

it to a flattened morality tale, we forfeit the

chance to learn from its horrific specificity.

We lose sight of the ordinary human choices

that made genocide possible.

Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize,

demean, and intimidate their targets. But

there is a cost for all of us because they

distract from the real issues challenging our

society, because they shut down productive,

thoughtful discourse. At a time when our

country needs dialogue more than ever, it is

especially dangerous to exploit the memory

of the Holocaust as a rhetorical cudgel. We

owe the survivors more than that. And we

owe ourselves more than that. ?

Edna Friedberg, PhD, is a historian in the Museum¡¯s

William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education.

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Still Under Threat

¡° My husband was the last man the military selected.

It was the last time I saw him. When they took

him, I tried to control my daughters. They were

calling out for their father to come back to them.¡±

¡ª MarJan, mother of twins

Mokurama and Mokuddus (age 7)

TESTIMONY AND PHOTOGRAPHY:

Greg Constantine, Bangladesh, 2018

IN DECEMBER, THE MUSEUM ANNOUNCED

its finding that compelling evidence suggests

the Burmese military committed genocide against

the Rohingya, a Muslim minority population

of Burma.

We recognize the tragedy of alerting the world

to a genocide that was foreseeable, where the

Museum and many others warned of the risks.

In 2015 alone, we issued two reports that outlined

the potential for genocide in Burma. In the years

since, we used our own reporting and that of

other organizations, including the Public International Law and Policy Group, which undertook

a documentation effort for the US Department of

State, and the United Nations, to perform a legal

analysis. We worked with a bipartisan group of

legal experts to review the evidence of genocide

and other crimes.

As an institution, the Museum did not come

to this conclusion lightly. We decided to make

By Naomi Kikoler

this announcement because we have a moral

obligation to serve as a voice of conscience on

behalf of communities that have experienced

genocide and other atrocity crimes. We felt that

it was important to stand with the Rohingya, who

have been persecuted for decades and for whom

the Burmese authorities deny the very right to

exist as a people.

Of course, the bar to determine genocide is

quite high. A formal determination is usually only

made by a court, but we felt that it was of critical

importance for us as an institution¡ªjust as we did

on ISIS a few years ago¡ªto announce our findings.

We hope the Museum¡¯s determination leads to

a review¡ªby the US government and the international community more broadly¡ªof policies toward

Burma. We hope that it prompts a consideration

of the types of tools that have been enacted in

other cases, yet have not been enacted in this one,

including additional sanctions toward senior-level

Background image: Detail of the Museum¡¯s statement about the Rohingya translated into Burmese.

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